Joe Biden and the bomb

Blogpost by Justin - 25 August, 2008 at 13:44

What kind of Vice President would Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s nely announced running mate, make? We just don’t know at this stage. But one thing we do know is that Biden is all too aware of the dangers of nuclear proliferation. From the report. ">The Permanent Nth Country Experiment: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation in a Rapidly Changing World, here’s Biden in his own words…

When I was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee […] I gathered the heads of all the national laboratories and some of their subordinates in [the Capitol]. I asked them a simple question. I said I would like you to go back to your laboratory and try to assume for a moment you are a relatively informed terrorist group with access to some nuclear scientists. Could you build, off-the-shelf, a nuclear device? Not a dirty bomb, but something that would start a nuclear reaction—an atomic bomb. Could you build one? They came back several months later and said: “We built one.” I got together all of my colleagues and only a few showed up. Then I figured, well, they weren’t paying much attention so I literally asked the laboratories to physically take this device into the Senate. Not a joke. As we used to say when I was a kid, it was bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a dump truck but they were able to get it in. They literally put it in a room and showed and explained how —literally off-the-shelf, without doing anything illegal l— they actually constructed this device.

Amazing stuff. Let’s hope he remember this if he find himself in the West Wing next January.